


Like a Virgin

by ClaraxBarton



Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Hawkeye (Comics), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types, Winter Soldier (Comics)
Genre: Bucky Barnes Recovering, Developing Relationship, Human Disaster Clint Barton, M/M, Smooth Bucky Barnes, canon adjacent, that's a real ass tag huh?, winterhawk - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-19
Updated: 2021-03-19
Packaged: 2021-03-28 09:07:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,317
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30137202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClaraxBarton/pseuds/ClaraxBarton
Summary: “I’ve had sex before,” Barnes said, apropos of literally nothing.Clint was just an innocent bystander, minding his own damn business, brewing his own damn coffee and staring at the coffee pot while caffeine drip drip dripped its way towards becoming liquid gold.As far as what the fuck? moments went, well… at least aliens and death and the end of the world weren’t involved?
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Clint Barton
Comments: 37
Kudos: 322





	Like a Virgin

**Author's Note:**

> Now beta read by the amazing Ro!!!

“I’ve had sex before,” Barnes said, apropos of literally  _ nothing _ .

Clint was just an innocent bystander, minding his own damn business, brewing his own damn coffee and staring at the coffee pot while caffeine  _ drip drip dripped _ its way towards becoming liquid gold.

As far as  _ what the fuck? _ moments went, well… at least aliens and death and the end of the world weren’t involved?

Four times now, Bruce and Thor had had to ask for Clint’s assistance in cleaning up “debris” from “experiments”.

Once, Tony had walked naked into Clint’s room with nearly a dozen other naked people and invited Clint to join him in a  _ “menage a- Hey, what do you call it when it’s thirteen people?” _

Nine years ago, when she was still practically feral and on the run from every government agency in the world, Natasha had shot Clint in the thigh, tracked him down via his blood trail, patched him up, threatened to kill him if he ruined one of her jobs again, and told him the recipe for her favorite kind of Russian tea cakes.

Two months after the Battle of New York - after Clint had aided in an alien conquest attempt on Earth, been fired from S.H.I.E.L.D, and given away every single literal cent from his many bank accounts to people and organizations trying to rebuild - Steve had asked Clint to pose in a toga with a shitty plastic bow so he could paint some kind of charity  _ Apollo _ painting.

Also, Clint had been hit on by a lot of people in a lot of weird ways in his thirty-two years of life.

So it wasn’t like he hadn’t heard some weird things, in some weird circumstances, before.

But Barnes, for all that he’d… survived some real, absolute shit, was supposed to be the  _ normal _ one around the Tower.

Sure, he’d died - or not quite died - back in ‘45 and he’d had his arm chopped off and then a metal one Frankenstein’d back on, and he’d been brainwashed and tortured and sent to be a murderbot for Hydra for seventy years and then spent two years running from everyone and piecing himself back into a mostly functioning human - but for all that, he really, truly had his shit together.

Or, at least, until this moment - this moment at four-fifteen in the morning, according to the coffee pot - Barnes had  _ seemed _ like he had his shit together.

It wasn’t until Barnes shifted - crossed his arms over his chest (and just to add to the _what the fucks,_ was he really wearing an ugly neon green Hulk hoodie with the sleeves ripped off, and _how_ _the fuck_ did he make it look so, so good?) - that Clint realized he was waiting for a response.

“Mmhm,” Clint managed to make his throat make a sound and- and here’s where he deserved some goddamn medals or at least acknowledgement from his therapist - and did not say any of the  _ millions _ of variants of  _ what the fuck _ that he wanted to.

“But I don’t remember it - any of it, any sex.” Barnes said, words underscored by the usually soothing  _ drip drip dripping _ .

Clint closed his eyes and bent over, pressed his entire face to the cool granite counter top and closed his eyes and silently asked, not for the first time,  _ what the fuck was his life? _

More shifting from Barnes. Barnes, who was maybe - probably - almost definitely - kind of - as good of a sniper as Clint, and sure as fuck more expierenced, could be still for hours, probably fucking days if he had to. Barnes, who didn’t move - ever - unless he wanted to or a literal supernatural force moved him.

So he wanted another response from Clint.

“That sucks a lot, Jay,” Clint said. That felt… Well, what the hell could he - should he - say in this situation? At least those words were honest?

Barnes moved closer, leaned his back against the counter only a foot - okay, probably fourteen inches if Clint was gonna let his geometrically inclined brain analyze this - away from where Clint still had his face pressed against it.

“Steve says I did. Says I was a ‘ladies man’ before the war.” Clint didn’t need to look at Barnes to know his lips were twisted into a not-sneer, not-smirk when he quoted Steve. “And he walked in on me and some of the Howlies, during the war.”

Clint had to actually bite his tongue to keep from asking which ones. He wasn’t a creep or anything, but that TV series about the Howlies back in the mid-’90s had been… truly a sexual awakening for Clint, whose previous fantasies had mostly featured the circus acrobats and a few really, really weird ones about the lion tamer and his brother that Clint still didn’t like to think too much on these days.

“Mmhm,” Clint made the sound again. He was pretty sure it was at least related to the sound Hill made when she was going for ‘encouraging but threatening’ instead of ‘intimidating but more threatening’.

“And Tony said Howard and I - but I don’t know if he’s just full of shit or if we actually - Clint, the guy had a mustache.”

Clint rolled his head on the counter so that he could see Barnes.

When he’d shown up at the Tower, after two and a half years of Steve searching for him, Barnes had had shoulder-length hair and facial hair that seemed to waver between ‘lazy hipster’ and ‘not quite mountain man’ most days. Now, after nine months of… whatever kind of dysfunctional socialization being an Avenger had given him, Barnes was almost always clean-shaven or, at most, sported two days of stubble and had recently let Sam drag him to get a hair cut so that the sides and back of his hair were a short undercut and the top was just long enough to start to curl with enough sweat or sleep or- 

Huh. Sex.

Barnes had sex hair.

Barnes had sex hair, and he was  _ talking about sex _ .

Clint straightened up so fast he actually felt a little dizzy.

“Who’re you fucking?” he spluttered.

And- 

Wow.

The look of shock Barnes sent him was almost a perfect mirror for what Clint felt about his own damn brain and mouth and their absolute mutiny against him.

“As far as I can tell, no one,” Barnes said slowly, calmly - not murder calm though, but like Steve was spiraling into a guilt/panic attack and he was trying to cut that shit off at the pass.

Clint looked at Barnes’ hair again.

That was absolutely sex hair. That was hair that had been pulled and tangled and-

_ Stop it _ , he firmly told his brain. 

_ And calm the fuck down _ , he added just for his libido, which,  _ hey, old friend, haven’t seen you around much since our whole mass murder, alien invasion assistant thing _ . 

But that was… not a thing he talked about, or thought about all that much, really. 

It was, however, a thing that Natasha had confronted him about, not six months ago.

“ _ You’ve only had eight one-night stands since Loki, and you haven’t tried to date anyone, and you’re only jerking off once a week.” _ She’s just said it all, just sat down on his bed while he worked his way through some bullshit yoga routine that Bruce had claimed was ‘soothing’ for the Big Guy, and said it like she was… patching him up and telling him her favorite Russian tea cake recipe.

“Mmhm,” he managed again. Much safer than  _ who’re you fucking _ ? It was a good thing Coulson wasn’t alive to see just how absolutely shit Clint’s interrogation techniques were these days.

Barnes gave him a look - Sniper Glare #5, not that Clint had extensively catalogued Barnes’ facial expressions.

“I don’t know what I like,” Barnes said, and the words sounded like a growl, sounded like a threat.

Clint was saved from any kind of disastrous response by the soft chime of the coffee pot. No beeping - Tony had eliminated  _ beeping _ from almost everything in the Tower after the fifth time a machine had been destroyed by one or more sleep-deprived Avenger who - hey, who would have guessed - didn’t react well to beeping when they were pulled out of a nightmare by it.

He made himself a cup of coffee - a single splash of milk, because Bruce had this  _ thing _ about black coffee, and even if he wasn’t standing beside Clint, his disappointed dad expression sure was. 

There was enough left in the pot for a second cup, and he lifted it and an eyebrow in Barnes’ direction.

“Thanks,” Barnes said.

Clint prepared another cup for him - enough milk that calling it coffee was up for grabs and three spoons of sugar, because Barnes deserved to enjoy good things without anyone giving him shit or trying to tell him he needed to cut back on anything. Plus, supersoldier, Bruce. Supersoldier with impeccable dental hygiene. At least according to the few glimpses Clint had had of Barnes’ smile.

He handed the cup over to Barnes, who took a slow sip, eyes closed to savor it. 

“Thanks,” Barnes said again.

Clint just nodded and took a few scalding gulps from his own cup.

“Steve says I used to be good at flirting,” Barnes said.

Clint snorted, couldn’t help it.

“Jay, Steve thinks being an asshole is flirting - you’ve heard Sam talk about Steve ‘flirting’ with him, haven’t you?”

Barnes’ face did something complicated. Automatic reflexive sneer when someone mentioned Sam - Clint was pretty sure Sam and Barnes had stood side-by-side in a mirror and practiced saying each other’s names and sneering so that they had identical expressions whenever anyone mentioned their ‘frenemy’. But the sneer was paired with a fond smile for Steve and his disastrous self and a smirk for the reference to Steve and Sam, whose relationship was, quite frankly, both a miracle and the gift that kept on giving, because Steve was absolute  _ trash _ at relationships but tried his damnedest to be good to Sam.

“He remembers some of my pickup lines,” Barnes said.

Clint took another gulp of his coffee. He tried to be rational, tried to tell himself not to, genuinely did attempt to stop his mouth from opening but-

“Yeah? Lay one on me, then.”

Barnes gave him a look, but took a sip of his coffee and put the mug down on the counter. 

He turned so he was facing Clint, and reflexively, Clint did the same.

Barnes smiled, a slow pull of lips away from his teeth and a curl at the corners that was a little higher on the left side than the right. 

“Hey there, sweetheart,” Barnes drawled.

Clint almost dropped his coffee, actually felt his grip go slack for a second and had to fumble at the cup with both hands before he could set it down and- and-

“That’s not a pickup line, Jay. That’s- that’s just a greeting.” Clint’s protest sounded a little frantic, a little high-pitched to his own ears, and he hoped that was just the aids picking up his voice weirdly. 

Barnes shrugged.

“Steve said it worked every time - said every time I called someone sweetheart, they ended up back at our place and he got stuck sleeping on the couch.”

That was- 

There were facts in that statement that Clint was going to circle back to later.

Clint licked his lips, wondered when the hell his mouth had gotten so dry.

“Still - that’s not a pickup line, Jay. You got anything else?”

Barnes frowned, his cute little thinking frown that he got when he was working with Tony or Bruce in the labs or analyzing data on terrorist cells or trafficking rings.

Then he straightened up, gave Clint a slow once over and a smirk - smirk #7, the same one he gave Natasha when she made weird Russian jokes that Clint understood the translation of but not the humor.

“I knew there was a reason I wanted to be here.”

Oh.

Oh,  _ shit _ .

To be fair - or something? - Barnes had had Clint at  _ Hey there, sweetheart _ . But this…

Shit.

Shit fuck  _ damn _ .

Right. Breathing. That was a thing Clint needed to do.

He sucked in a breath, choked on it, on  _ air _ , because of fucking course he did.

Barnes gave him a look, somewhere between concerned and confused, and it was- it was cute as hell and-

Clint grabbed his coffee cup and downed the rest of it, too fast to really buy himself any time, but still… it was… it was something. 

“Still nothing?” Barnes asked, and he sounded a little…

Hurt?

Disappointed?

Shit.

“No, no. That was- that was great, Jay. I- Yeah. Steve wasn’t wrong. That was- Yeah.”

_ Wow _ ,  _ great job on the communication with words, Clint _ .

Barnes frowned, though, as if Clint’s lame attempt to compliment him had done the exact opposite.

“But you still- You’re not interested, are you?”

Clint blinked.

Clink blinked and he stared, and he realized that he was a complete and utter fucking  _ moron _ .

He replayed their entire conversation - then a few more - and then a few more after that and- 

Oh, shit.

Shit fuck  _ damn _ .

“Jay,” Clint put his empty cup on the counter, “I’ve been interested since Tasha told me about the time you shot through her to kill that Iranian scientist. You- you literally had me at hello. That first hello, when you were on my range at two in the morning tossing knives at targets sixty yards away. You- you can stop me at any time, or I’m just gonna keep going and-”

“I’m gonna kiss you now, and I want you to show me how you like to be kissed.”

“Was that another fucking line? Barnes, did you seriously impregnate every woman and man in Brooklyn when you-”

Thankfully, Barnes kissed him then.

-o-

  
  
  



End file.
